Give me the notes that hush the raging seas,
That urge the horseman and his charger on,
Make foes disarm and fall upon their knees,
And garlands fade where Victory once had shone,
And vigorous Youth to glitter as the sun,
And frenzied Prowess with her tossing plume
From off the gore-drenched field that she has won
To bear the trophies of a nation's doom,
While millions weep above an ignominious tomb.
XXI.
There lies the stalwart form in Death's last sleep,
There rest the foamy lip, the bloodshot eye,
The noble brow o'er which some heart doth weep,
Whose only elegy—the buried sigh.
There kneels the friend and comrade who would die
Beside the form he loved, alas, so well,
Now in his last expiring agony,
When every breath is as a funeral knell,
And the soul bleeds with thoughts that Friendship cannot tell.
XXII.
The last long clasp, the hushed and trembling kiss,
The mother weeping at her beauty's side,
And Death's last look and stiffening clutch—is this,
Is this the outcome of a nation's pride?
There lie the clammy corpses far and wide,
And locks bedabbled and the princely cheek,
Son, father, brother, husband, side by side—
Oh, such a tale of horror who can speak!
Together heaped the dead and dying, strong and weak.
XXIII.
But to our text, my friends, as parsons say,
This is soliloquy, I quite neglect
My tale, from which I've wandered far away,
But what, from such as I, can you expect?
I wished your kind attention to direct
Some stanzas back—I think 'twas eight or nine—
To Music's wondrous power you'll recollect,
But somehow left my subject line by line,
To which no doubt you'll say I should myself confine.
XXIV.
I am no minstrel, and I'd have you know it,
Altho' that is the title of these pages,
Nor do I yet pretend to be a poet,
Those things that should be kept in wire cages,
That move to Colney Hatch by easy stages,
And keep good company upon the road,
Consisting of some dozen or two sages,
Who, like our tins of dynamite, explode,
And really are most dangerous things to be abroad.
XXV.